ISSUE 6
D. Eric Parkison
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Fresh Milk
With the tongs I turn the jar
Swamped in boiling water.
Whatever we’ve known of care
Receives, in accumulating acts,
Addenda or revision. The plaques
Of your blue milk dissolve like wax
Above the stove’s blue flame,
Carry off the routines we name
Love. In their place, the calm,
Sure turning, lids and nipples scrubbed
In rainbowed froths of soap, a braid
Of practices which will extend,
Day on day, the range
Of my attention. You are strange
These first months: your watch sustains
The light bundle smiling from the floor
And bubbling into his first laughter.
You do not break his gaze, but answer ‘More’
When I ask how much time to be certain
That the jar is clean, so I return
To my task, what I hadn’t known
Would become this broader truce.
Later, while he sleeps: a slice
Of pie spilling cherry juice.
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D. Eric Parkison received his MFA from Boston University. His chapbook, No Arcadia, was released in August of 2020. Recent work appears in Volume Poetry and the South Dakota Review. He is the recipient of a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowship. He is the programming director at the Gloucester Writers Center and lives in Lynn, MA.